


Adrianne

by poisontaster



Series: AKB Outtakes [15]
Category: American (US) Actor RPF, RPF - Fandom, Supernatural RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Slavery, F/M, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 00:18:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14884005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: Annie needs a change.





	Adrianne

“Hey. Sandy said you were looking for me?” Gripping the overhead jamb with both hands, Annie leans into the office, stretching out the kinks in her back. For a change, Kane is in here, and behind the desk, which is weird enough it should be marked in a calendar somewhere. Chad might even have a pool, in which case, she’s got some money coming.

“Yeah, here.” He holds out a thick sheaf of papers to her, so thick they doesn’t bend, not looking away from the screen. 

It’s kind of a shame he’s too proud to wear his glasses more, she thinks, they’re actually kind of sexy on him. Oooh. She purses her lips, considering. Kane wouldn’t have called her down here for a midafternoon screw...but that doesn’t mean she can’t advocate for one, after whatever this is. The prospect gives her a little heat, a little tingle, sweet anticipation.

“What’s that?” She lets go of the doorway and puts a little bit extra hip-wiggle in her crossing of the room.

“The dorm’s budget,” Kane says, sweeping off his glasses and looking at her in the same gesture.

It’s an unexpected enough answer that she trips a little over her own feet and drags to a halt. “It’s what?”

“The dorm’s budget.” Kane smiles and it’s not friendly. At all, dang those wicked blue eyes. “This is going to be your problem now.”

“Excuse me?” Annie draws up short of the desk, hooking one foot behind the ankle of the other and arching her back a little. Whatever’s happening, it can’t hurt to be as cute as possible. She’s good at cute.

“I want you to take over the budgeting for the dorm. All the information’s in here, be sure to ask Jensen if you have any questions.” He waves the papers at her again, and his grin turns wickeder.

Annie snatches the papers from him and flips through them, brows furrowing in. It’s no joke; it’s a whole bunch--a _lot_ \--of papers about the running of the dorm. Shit, do they really spend that much money on food? Every _week_?

Then, homing back in on the problem: “Why me?” The instinctive, defensive cock of her hip gets messed up by all the papers in her arms; she tucks them in at her side and glares at Kane, who just raises his eyebrows. 

“Are you saying you can’t do it?”

“That’s not what I said.” Dammit, he’s got her on her back foot already.

“Then what’s the problem?” Kane leans back in his chair, manspreading and eyeballing her. It’s ninety-percent him torturing her and loving it, but with a teensy bit of sparkle that tells her he might be down for a ride after all. And just because she’s annoyed with him doesn’t mean she’ll turn it down. It’s been a really long time for the two of them; a long time since Kane’s messed with anyone in the house, now that she thinks of it. 

“I’m just wondering.” She comes around to his side of the desk and perches on its corner, looking at him through her lashes. Now that Saint Jensen’s come through and cleaned the whole place up, she can actually do that. She props one foot on Kane’s chair. She’s wearing jeans, so it’s not as effective as it could be, but Kane’s a smart guy, he gets the gist, sliding under the denim and braceleting her ankle with his fingers, tickling her calf. Kane’s a guitarist; he’s good with his hands. As she recollects. “There’s gotta be someone who’d be better at it than me. Jared, or Joe...they’ve got all that extra-special schooling.” A one-shouldered, rolling shrug that brings her breast back into play. 

“See, what has happened is, you’ve mistaken this for a discussion.” Kane unwraps his fingers and tucks both hands behind his head, lazy-eyed. “You’re _going_ to do this. You. By yourself. Don’t bat those pretty eyelashes and get Joe or Chad--I know everything, and don’t you forget it--and get them to help you out with this.”

Annie drops her leg to the floor, playfulness and desire fading. “I’ve never done anything remotely like this!”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

Annie puts the papers down on the desk, sobering when she realizes he really _really_ means this. “Wait, no. Seriously, Kane. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know that I _can_ do this.” 

It galls her to admit it; she doesn’t like to make it seem like there’s anything she can’t do. It makes for a bad impression. At the same time, this...this is serious business. 

Kane sighs. “Okay, let’s get serious,” he says, and crosses his arms over his chest, scooting lower in his chair. There’s nothing flirtatious in his eyes now. “You’re _bored_ , Annie.”

Annie gapes at him. She hadn’t known what he was going to say, but she hadn’t expected whatever it was to hit her so low and treacherously in the gut. 

“And you’re bored because you don’t have enough to do, fluffing pillows and dusting countertops around here. So now you get something else to do. Problem solved.” He picks up the sheaf and shoves at Annie until she takes it from him. “Don’t fuck it up.”

“I promise nothing,” Annie says, flipping through it all again, already sweating at all the pages of numbers. So many numbers. She’s handled the budget for the household cleaning supplies, and Jeff’s given them all their own tab for personal items, and she helps Chad with his, because he’s hopeless with money, but nothing this big. Hell, this would make her responsible for everyone’s personal accounts. Chad’s going to blow his colon about that. She shakes her head and sighs, envisioning it already. 

“Oh, and I’m going to need you to cut twenty-thousand from the overall budget.”

“You’re shitting me!”

“Nope.” Smug bastard looks so damned pleased with himself; Annie’s not sure if she wants to smack the crap out of him or….

Tossing her hair back: “Well, if you’re going to pitch me a curveball like _that_ , I think you _owe_ me an orgasm.” She puts on a smirk of her own, “or a few.”

Kane rotates his chair toward her, curling his forefingers into her belt loops. “I believe I’m authorized to make that deal, m’am,” he says, and pulls her down onto his lap.

***

“What’re you doing?”

Annie’s fingers fist around her highlighter and she regrets deeply that it’s too dull to do any real damage, if she stabs him with it. “Jared. A closed door is a _really_ clear sign that I want to be left alone.”

Jared flops onto her bed. “Yeah, but dinner’s ready and I got volunteered to bring you food.” 

Indeed, he does have the promised food in his hand, a deep bowl surprisingly undisturbed by his fall to her mattress. Now that her attention’s diverted from the pages in front of her, she can _smell_ dinner. Sandy or Joe must have done the cooking, it looks delicious. Her stomach growls like a trapped beast and she feels it all the way into her spine. 

“You’re an angel,” she says, snatching the bowl and silverware from him and using her elbow to make room on her desk at the same time. “I love you with all my heart. Now get out.”

“But what is all this?” Jared gets up and goes around to her other side, poking shamelessly at the spread of stuff on her desk. 

“Jared.” Annie abandons her dinner to slap his hands away. “I’m not kidding. I’ve got everything just where I want it and if you so much as breathe on it wrong, I’m putting Tiger Balm on your dick while you’re sleeping!”

Jared takes a prompt step back, which is gratifying, though he’s still _here_. “Is this… That’s the accounting for the dorm.”

“Yes, you’re very smart, very observant.” Annie gets up and wheels Jared around. She’s tall enough that she can sort of manhandle Jared. As long as he’s not fighting it, at least. Unfortunately, he digs his heels when she shoves him at the door, twisting like a fish on a line.

“What are you doing? Maybe I could help.”

Annie gives up trying to force Jared out of the room and plants both hands on her hips instead. “Jared.” She breathes in and out carefully, trying to keep a rein on her temper. Jared’s like one his dogs; always wanting to know what’s going on, wanting to be around people. He means well, though. He always means well. And he hurts easy, though he always puts a good face on it.

“Thanks, J, but Kane gave this to me to do.” 

Jared opens his mouth and Annie puts up a hand, holding him off. “I appreciate the offer, Jaybird. But Kane specifically told me I can’t ask for help. And. I’d really like to work it out for myself.” Remembering the smug-ass look on Kane’s face as he handed all this off, it pisses her off that it’s true...but there it is. Not only is she stuck doing this, now she’s actually talked herself into _wanting_ to do it. God, she is such a rube.

“I get that,” Jared says, shrugging. “It’s just not like you to close yourself off from everybody else. We were worried.”

“Ahhh, so it wasn’t just bringing me food, was it?” Annie tugs a loose end of his trailing hair. He’s forgotten to get it cut again. “You’re a _spy._ ” 

“A _shitty_ spy!” Chad contributes from outside the door. Then it swings open and Chad comes in to flop on her mattress in the spot Jared just vacated, spreading across it as if to declare his domain. “I told you guys it should’ve been me.”

“Oh my god, you guys are the absolute worst.” Annie rolls her eyes toward the ceiling, struggling not to laugh.

“Just some concerned friends,” Joe says, coming into sight and leaning lazily against the jamb. She still hasn’t _quite_ figured out what his deal is, but he’s starting to blend in. And he’s a lot nicer to sleep with--actual sleeping--than anyone else in the dorm, even with the nightmares. 

“So what _are_ you doing?” Sandy peeks around the other side of the doorjamb, as usual, the least sure of her welcome. 

“Work!” Annie throws up her hands. “I am doing work. Or at least I was, before.”

Sandy’s nose wrinkles, not in disgust. “What kind of work?”

“I…” Annie glances over her shoulder at all the stuff strewn over her desk--probably the _first_ time she’s ever had enough of anything on her desk to classify as ‘strewn’. She gets it then, how weird this all is. 

If any of them was going to bring their work home with them, it was likely Jared or Chad, with some baby animal that wasn’t nursing right. Though never goats again, dear God. 

But it’s always been like Kane said: she makes beds and fluffs pillows and dusts shit. Nothing that she needed to bring back to the dorm with her. Nothing she needed to shut herself up in her bedroom with. Of course it’s weird for all of them; aren’t they all pretty much connected at the hip?

“I don’t know, honestly,” she says, shrugging. “A lot of numbers that I don’t know yet what to do with. A lot of stuff I need to figure out.”

“We _could_ help,” Jared wheedles, giving her puppy eyes, though not, she notes, his _best_ puppy eyes. “Kane would never know.”

Annie grabs him by the arm, detours by the bed to grab Chad’s ear in her other hand, and drags them both--Chad cussing the whole way--to the door, which Joe and Sandy kindly vacate. “I appreciate it guys.” It’s sincere this time, a soft warmth in the center of her chest. “Really, I do. But it’s not just Kane. I need to figure it out for myself. I want to.”

She gives them a bright, loving smile…

...and then closes the door in their faces.

And locks it, this time.

***

“Ha!” Annie slams the--now organized, hole punched, and bound--papers down on the table. She’s maybe a little heavy-handed, because coffee slops out of Kane’s mug onto the wood.

“God _damn_ , Annie,” Kane groans, swiping his unwashed hair back from his eyes to glare at her sidelong. He’s hungover, which of course she knew already. “Something you want to share?” 

“ _That_ ’s for your stupid budget!” Annie’s swelling pride can’t be pierced by the need to whisk Kane’s napkin from his lap and mop up the coffee. “I _own_ that budget. It bows before me, I am its _queen_!”

It’s only there for a second, but Annie sees the pleased curl of Kane’s lips before he covers it up. He wiggles his fingers, _come at me_. “Show me what you got.”

For all the work she put into it, it takes a depressingly short amount of time to go through the pages. Perched on the edge of the chair next to Kane, she starts to fidget with a butter knife, spinning it around on the wood...at least until Kane slaps his fingers over hers. 

“Where’d you cut the twenty-thousand?”

“I couldn’t find a way to cut an even twenty-k,” she admits, and _now_ her stomach is fluttering. She’s glad she didn’t have anything heavier than one of Jared’s smoothies this morning; if she had, she’d probably vomit it up over the remains of Kane’s breakfast. 

_Was_ she supposed to have cut an even twenty-thousand? Was she going to fail, because she had cut more? What did failing even mean? 

_Oh, my God, get a grip on yourself, girl!_

“So I ended up cutting more than that,” she says, blotting her palms on her jeans before pulling the binder to her and turning to the relevant pages. “But I think I did it in a good way. I couldn’t see a good reason to pull it from the personal accounts, and we all know we’d have some kind of Donner Party incident happening if it got pulled from the food budget and Jared couldn’t get his gummi worms…”

Again, the smile flicks briefly across Kane’s mouth, which Annie decides to take as a good sign. She points out the obvious cuts she made, hoping he doesn’t notice how bitten down her nails have gotten in just a couple days. Who knew she was a nail biter?

“But,” she says finally, “that wasn’t really enough.”

Kane looks at her. She feels something cold and anxious skitter down her spine, but _no_. She did this right, she knows she did. 

“If you go back _here_ , back to the food budget breakout from the estate budget. There’s no reason we should be spending this much.”

Again, Kane gives her that same blank, blue eyed look. 

“No, seriously. I mean, I know we all eat a lot, and I didn’t spend long in my former house, but I know enough to know, this is robbery. Especially this guy here. So I made some calls.”

“You made some calls,” Kane repeated. He reaches for his coffee, drains the mug, and pours out another one from the carafe. 

Annie shrugs, trying not to _look_ defensive, even if she can’t help feeling it. “It’s not any different than the kind of stuff I do with the cleaning stuff. The vendor could cut us a break--should cut us one, for as much as we’re spending per year. Which I told him. _Look_.” She taps the page, then sighs. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

Kane shakes his head, then winces a little at the gesture. “I’m just listening.”

“There’s three other markets that would give us food as good, for less. Not a _lot_ less, at least without talking to them, but already less, just off the board. This one,” she points, “is a new company, and they’re thirsty. They’d definitely be down to make a deal. But, you know,” she shrugs, “I didn’t want to step outside my authority, whatever that is. Still. It was enough for me to go back to our original guy and tell him he needed to cut us a _way_ better break before we went shopping somewhere else.”

The memory is enough to make her smile, even through the nervous sweat and toes clenched so tight they’re starting to cramp. “So _this_ ,” she says, lifting up to produce the folded up page from her back pocket, “is what he’s willing to cut our tab by.”

Now Kane has a reaction; his eyebrows go up and he whistles under his breath. 

“That number, that’s just for the dorm budget, to the best of my calculations. The second number there is what he’s willing to cut from the overall house budget, but I don’t really have access to that, so I just said I’d have to bump it back to you and Sam and see what you think.”

Kane’s reaction was gratifying enough that her butterflies are sorting themselves out. Annie grabs the thick curls of her hair and twists them up in a bun on the top of her head, securing it with a hair tie from a different pocket. The temperature difference on her neck is almost instantaneous and blissful. 

“Though, honestly,” she ventures, “I think we should kick this guy entirely and go with one of these guys.” She indicates the other three companies she’d looked up. “Because that guy was gouging us, just because he could and because he didn’t think we knew better.”

“Clearly we didn’t know better.” Kane says, staring between the pages in front of him, before looking up at her again. His face still looks weird. “You did good.”

It takes the words a minute to sink in. When they do, she makes a stuttery-hiccuping laugh, not quite able to believe them. “I did?”

Kane tilts his head. “You don’t need me to tell you that, Annie.”

She makes a doubtful humming noise. “I think maybe I do, just a little bit. This one time.”

Kane takes her hand. Not like it’s foreplay or teasing, but like he’d take a Lady’s hand, someone he’s trying to impress. It’s then it clicks for her, for some strange reason. It’s been weird because there hasn’t been any of that banter they normally do, or that she normally does. He hasn’t been sizing her up or kidding around with her. He’s been looking at her like this is business, real business. 

And he--none of them--have really looked at her like that before. Oh, sure, she’s been their den momma, kissing their hurts and keeping order, but that’s because she’s their big sis, and she doesn’t take their shit. Not because she was someone they _had_ to listen to, or care about her opinion. 

“Annie,” Kane says, patient and kind as she’s ever known him to be outside of fucking, “you’re good at this, girl. Really good. You’ve got a gift for it, natural as anything.”

“Shit,” Annie breathes, still not moving as Kane lets her go, turning back to his plate. 

Kane tweaks the last piece of bacon off his plate and crunches it up between slurping mouthfuls of coffee. It’s gross and it’s pretty clearly a dismissal, so Annie puts a pin in her swirling thoughts and flexes her toes as she gets up from the table, blood rushing back in pins and needles. She’s still got a lot of work to do, starting with clearing this table of the wreckage of breakfast and getting a start on the dishes.

If there’s no company, folks usually bus their own plates, but there’s still all the other stuff, serving plates and bowls, the leftovers, the pitcher of water and coffee carafe. 

“Don’ even think about it,” Kane says through his food, wrapping his arm protectively around the carafe when she moves to take it. The teasing is back in his eyes, wicked and fond at the same time.

“No need to rip my hands off!” Annie holds the hands in question up and widens her eyes at him, backing away from the table’s edge. 

She’s gathering up a load of things to carry into the kitchen when Kane growls at her: “Annie.”

“What?” She puts a hand on her hip, feigning annoyance. 

“Don’t forget your binder.” He gives her a taut, smirky grin and shoves it down the length of the table at her. She halts it, before it can go flying off the edge. 

“What?”

Kane tips his chin up at her. “I told you, that’s your problem now.”

“No but I thought… It was just a test, right?”

Wasn’t it?

“And you passed, with flying colors.” Kane smirks wider. “Hit me up later, some time after lunch, and I’ll show you how to get into the household files, so you can look at those, too.”

“I’m not going to be responsible for those, too, am I?” Is she yelping? It feels like she’s yelping. Where is her goddamned cool? 

“Oh, not yet,” Kane says, which isn’t reassuring at all. “Need to work you up that. But soon enough. Once we file the paperwork and get you all official.”

“Official?” Annie puts down the pile of dishes under her right arm before she drops them. “Official _what_?”

Kane pours the last drops of coffee from the carafe into his mug and scoots his chair back with his thighs. For once, she’s not even thinking about his thighs, as he gets up. “Well, if you’re gonna be doing all this extra work, you should get the title to go along with it, don’t you think, _Agent_?”

Annie’s aware her mouth has fallen open, but she can’t seem to exert a single muscle’s control to close it. Finally, “A-Agent?”

 

“Oh, Annie.” He clucks his tongue and shakes his head sorrowfully. “You’re a damn smart girl, to be quite so dumb. What did you think this was?”

“I didn’t think!” _Definitely_ yelping now. “I was too busy trying to figure out how to _do_ ‘this’.”

Kane shrugs and gestures toward her with his mug. “And you did. Congratulations. Now you better get a move on, before Sam gets it in her head that I’m keeping you from your work. Because that’s one hit I’m _not_ taking for ya.” 

He takes a step toward the door, but Annie’s really only aware of it in her peripheral, looking at the binder she’d taken so much care with and the pile of dirty dishes. 

“Oh,” Kane says, making it sound like an afterthought, though she’ll bet it’s no such thing. Bastard. “And it looks like we’re going to need a new housemaid, and maybe some other staff. I’m going to need you to make room in the budget for...say four more people.”

A new housemaid? Other staff? Annie doesn’t know which is the bigger uppercut; the idea that she’s no longer going to be cleaning up around the place, or that she’s going to have to try and squeeze another _four_ people in that budget somewhere, just after she got it all cleaned up.

“Tell you what, though,” Kane says, his grin bright and pure fucking evil. “I’ll let have back all that money you just saved.”


End file.
